A teacher and his ticks.

We teachers all love ticking work.  That green, unaccompanied tick on every page of an exercise book - a solemn nod to the Ofsted inspector that this work has been read by teacher, and that the student must, therefore, be making lovely rapid progress.

Ah, sarcasm.  Can't beat it.  But as a slightly foolish and over-excitable relative of irony, very relevant indeed.  For this week, the ticks were not a teacher's best friend at all; no, they made life a complete misery.

Exmoor is a beautiful, wild zone separating the Bristol Channel from the A361, a realm of heather-smirched rounded hills and terrifying steep descents into sleepy seaside towns.  It is famous for its scenery, its cider, its horrifying 1950s floods and its beautiful population of red deer, which have wandered the place since God-knows when.  These deer are content to bellow maniacally and smash each others' heads in, seemingly oblivious to the grim creatures that stud their exterior.  Deer, you see, are the Pearly Kings and Queens of Exmoor, studded with tiny, shiny humps of pearlescent white and marbled brown - often resembling the branch of Selfridges in Birmingham, so cloaked in blood-sucking ticks they are.  For these arachnid vampires are a very real presence anywhere that large mammals such as red deer, roe deer, dogs and people interact with each other through the medium of long grass: a lesson I have learned well this week.

Exmoor's coast, near Lynton.
A picture of a tick would just gross you out.

Pitching a tent by a river on a flattened plain of trampled long grass seemed a splendid idea at 6pm in the evening, after a long drive along apparently endless hills of 25% gradient and above.  Get the tent up, crack open a beer and sob by the camp fire - that was the plan.  And it worked.  The tent was up in no time, the beer was rivaling the stream at our feet in volume and swiftness of flow, and the exhausted sobbing of amateur campers could be heard in Tiverton.  In fact, the whole time there went reasonably well.  Maritime vistas were photographed and instantly spread by Facebook, steak was consumed in dusty old inns tucked under perilous cliffs and dogs were befriended and sat by the campfire like sentinals.  It wasn't until we had packed our tent and made our way home that we discovered we had stowaways, presumably picked up from the long grass that had become our carpet.

No red deer had been seen at all in the week, so ticks had been of little concern to us; our hubris would have made Macbeth tut and shake his head in worry.  For my part, I had never even seen a tick in the wild, and was of the opinion that ticks only ever happened to 'other people' - people who liked carrying maps in plastic envelopes around their necks and ate Kendal mint cake more than once a year.  They never happened to folk who drank lattes and drove a Fiesta.  Well, they did happen
.  Four separate ticks, all nuzzled in that peculiarly intimate way of theirs into just one individual.  Four tiny little beasts - spiders drawn by toddlers - all eagerly burrowing down to the artesian well of blood that lies beneath the skin.

Cue a brace of days frantically tumble-drying every single item of clothing taken on the trip, at a high heat, for twenty minutes.  Cue panicked research online into the order of symptoms and likeliness of death from Lyme Disease.  Cue endless - limitless and deathly boring - examinations of bare skin every time an itch was felt.  Believe me, the experience was so icky that itches were a constant, dull reminder of the body's ability to freak itself out unnecessarily.  Everything itched.  I'm fairly certain that for a short time, even my pockets were itching.

It's all over now, but I'm painfully aware that should another darling little critter rear its abdomen at any point in the next week, we'll have to go through the whole de-ticking process once more, at which point I will probably just give in to their whims and allow them to turn me into a walking nosebag.

I look forward to September, where I will once again be dishing out the ticks, rather than being a dish for them.

Headaches

I seem to get headaches a lot.  I get them so often, that I'm starting to view them dispassionately, trying to figure out what caused them, where the sensation actually is, what positions/movements affect them and why/how they eventually go off.  As such, I feel I can now publish my Headache Spotter's Guide and help out all fellow sufferers of the malady.

Headache #1

The Eye One

Centered around one of the eye sockets, epicentre usually seemingly in the very bone of the skull, in mockery of your vain attempts to massage the pain away.  A constant, dull soreness, no throbbing with occasional flurries of excruciating pain when looking at bright light or laughing.  Affected by light, thinking hard about difficult matters, blocked nose, poor eyesight.  Cure: glasses, closing eyes, time.

Headache #2

The Neck One

Centered at the base of the skull and top of the neck, epicentre is apparently your very spinal column: the very think that makes you a vertebrate fighting back.  Pain also spread around muscles in that area. Muscle pain, mostly, but with an insistence that is frankly rude, and prevents you from doing anything useful.  Affected by sleeping position, weight of head, amount of nodding, dancing wildly to anything pre-1984.  Cure: Neck brace, sleeping with only one pillow, neck massage, decapitation.

Headache #3

The Brain One

Floating freely around your cranium, epicentre is everywhere at once and makes you sad.  The entire dome of your head becomes an upturned basket of pain, spilling agony out into the rest of your head and often, if you're lucky, your teeth too.  Pain comes in many forms, but usually throbbing and inconsistent pain that will continually kid you into thinking its gone, before striking you down with a bolt of fire when you try getting out of your seat.  Affected by everything, but especially aggravated by thirst, lack of sleep, lust and needing the loo.  Cure: painkillers, silence and sleep.

Headache #4

Migraine

Different for everyone, and probably less common than you'd think.  People who've had one are obvious - you can sense it in the clear fear they show when discussing the subject, and their avoidance of anything that could possibly lead to another episode.  Pain is intense and debilitating, making you disinclined to socialising, reading or being alive a second longer.  Can be accompanied, or preceded by aura, which is an impossible term to define but basically consists of the brain going haywire and fooling the key senses into thinking nonsense, such as talking bees spreading from growing cracks in your vision, to the all-pervading smell of garlic invading your entire head.  Or just blurriness and discolouration in what you look at.  Affected by continuing to exist and all its trappings.  Cure: unknown.

An excerpt from my travel journal:

Day 1

Having the sick bucket beside my leg is no qualification.  Upon rumour of sickness at the front of the bus, the bucket was passed nonchalantly away from me, to remove any possibility that I may become embroiled in the ensuing affair.  Sadly, I still had to report the incident to the self-appointed vomit-manager - catchphrase, 'I can do sick'.  Confused by the ambiguous nature of the verb in this sentence, I simply nodded and retreated back to my seat, humbled and strangely sad.

Bendy Phones and other Blights

Today the internet has been heaving with the news that mobile phones will soon be bendy, like a bit of old elastic you find behind the wardrobe.  This will mean that we could, for example, wear them like a funky, time-wasting bracelet, or use them to prop up wobbly restaurant tables, or run around bending them around, laughing and crying at the fact that the technological might of our species – this awesome, collective, gargantuan knowledge amassed and perfected over the centuries – has finally allowed us to wrap a telephone around a stick.

I should, perhaps, apologise for my facetiousness, but I am fed up with the endless touting of ‘tweaks’ on existing items.  My joy to see that Dyson has made a bladeless fan was tempered by the fact that flinging shit at it would now no longer have the desired effect.  The unveiling of the iPhone 5 was marred slightly by the fact that they’d forgotten to make any changes to the iPhone 4 (or 3…etc).  Everything’s being tweaked to death, and nothing new seems to be being invented anymore.  I’m sure something must be being invented somewhere (they’ve got to get on with hoverboards and Jaws 19 for 2015, after all…), but we never seem to hear about it.  We only become aware of these endless ‘improvements’, and it’s all about money, of course.

I’m no social philosopher, but sometimes I remember that civilisation is an unprecedented experiment, led by no-one, and with no real hypothesis.  When in these moods, I contemplate the fact that we have absolutely no idea – no idea at all – what the outcome of all this technological tweakery is.  We know why it’s happening: money.  Profit drives the eternal tweaking of existing models, as it’s hugely cheaper than the development of an entirely new idea, and far safer too.  But if that’s all that is driving it, then what will the eventual outcome be?  If ‘progress’ is going to boil straight down to profit, is there any hope of a highly developed, highly successful, ‘Type III Civilisation’ being realised?  Risk, inherent in any development of totally new technology, is very expensive and not particularly enjoyed by big business.  As such, new things are less desirable, to business, than tweaked things.  In short,  I fear that we could end up coming to a halt, endlessly poking around with existing ideas, and never doing anything truly new.

They're afraid of Virginia Woolf?

How can it be that Virginia Woolf is missing, or under-represented, from the majority of A-Level English Literature specifications, ?  True, OCR, AQA and WJEC allow a tiny smidgen of Woolf in one of their units, but never for the independent studies, and usually as a single choice amongst many other texts.

Woolf is a vital date in the timeline of English Literature.  She is one of the more accessible 1920s English writers, and provides a useful transatlantic counterpoint to those mainstays of Literature syllabuses, Fitzgerald and early Hemingway.  Her writing is a wonderful 'way in' to Modernism (which should be a module on any Literature course!), and fills the gap between the Victorians (who are amply represented) and the mid-late 20th century poets, such as Heaney, who also fill the syllabus.  Her writing is structurally unusual, and she did things with the form of the novel that all students could get their teeth into.  Let's face it - Woolf's writing is something all students of literature should get a taste of.  But they don't.

A student reading Mrs. Dalloway would learn a lot about individual writing styles, about character development, about train-of-thought, about biased narration, and about structure.  They would also learn a great deal about the nature of writing, and its tribulations.  Sure, students discover something about the difficulties women faced in the world of literature if they check out the Brontes, but studying Woolf (with, perhaps, Plath as well) would flag up the less rosy side of literature, which, I believe is something worth highlighting - it's not easy, being an artist.

With the release of the new KS4 curriculum, I was hoping there would be more room for Woolf, but disappointment was the inevitable result.  The focus of the literary side of the syllabus (which is certainly full, if nothing else) is on pre 1918 work, with only a tiny possibility of inserting any 20th century prose (British fiction, poetry or drama since the First World War - pretty harsh either/or choice there...)  Thus we get more and more Shakespeare and less and less Modernist or Postmodernist texts.  The way the world's going, and the need for every student to be able to make rapid links in a modern world, makes me very sad that this is the case.  Woolf's modernity, flavoured with some delicious Mansfield and then some postmodern garnish, would have created a tasty chunk of GCSE fare.

Show students The Waves, and you'd simply blow their minds with what novels can actually be.  Give them a snippet of Orlando, and they'd never be the same again.  Get them to read A Room of One's Own, and see them understand the literary process as never before.

I first came across Woolf in my second year and University, and she blew me away with her style, technique and imagination.  I don't think it should be left that late.